Glorious Grace

Psalm 24 & Ephesians 1: 3-14
15^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 12^th July 2009

I just returned yesterday evening from a conference at Montreat Conference Center, outside Asheville, NC, to celebrate the legacy of John Calvin on the 500^th anniversary of his birth, 10^th July 1509, in Noyon, France (northeast of Paris). The conference was billed as the Calvin Jubilee. As many have said to me, the thought of a Calvin Jubilee sounds like an oxymoron. It’s only an oxymoron, however, if one buys into the stereotypes we have of the man. He’s been much maligned over the years. If we did a word-association test with Calvin, the following words would probably come to mind: killjoy, sourpuss, a dour and vengeful sort, a sadist, misogynist, a narrow-minded prig, a prudish moralist, a tyrant, a religious fanatic, a cold, melancholic, even phlegmatic soul, “a steely spinner of harsh theological doctrines about a depraved humanity and a fierce God predestining people to heaven or hell.” He was certainly despised by some in his Geneva; some even named their dogs after him.

As the spiritual founder of the Reformed theological tradition, a leading theologian of the church, along with Augustine (354-430), Aquinas (c.1225-1274), and Barth (1886-1968), Calvin deserves a little more respect. Actually, we need to completely rehabilitate him, reclaim him in the church. It’s difficult to celebrate the man because he left us very little account of his personal life experience. He didn’t like to talk about himself and would not relish the attention given to him. He requested at his death that he be buried in an unmarked grave in Geneva. He didn’t want a shrine erected over his grave, neither did he want his bones to become holy relics for adoration.

People can say what they will about Calvin, and have, but as Peter Steinfels wrote in The New York Times last Saturday, Calvin was “a religious thinker and leader who may have done as much as anyone to shape the modern world.”[1] He’s often associated with predestination and usually quickly dismissed because of what we think he said about predestination, usually confusing predestinattion with predeterminism – and they are not the same. Calvin was not an advocate of predeterminism. He was an advocate of predestination – or what theologians call the doctrine of election.

The contemporary novelist, Marilynne Robinson, author of the Pulitzer-prize winning, Gilead (one of my favorite novels), is a huge fan of Calvin. She’s a deacon in her church in Iowa and has been reading Calvin for years, for fun. She also reads Calvin in order to make her life better, and therefore commends him to the church. She claims that reading Calvin’s beautiful French prose has made her a better writer, but more than anything, in reading Calvin, (his sermons, his commentaries on scripture, in masterful Institutes) she has come to see the glory and wonder and amazement of God pouring through his writings. When Calvin wrote about theology, about God, he was not interested in rational speculative considerations of the divine, which, as he put is, “Flits about in the brain doing nothing.”[2]

The doctrine that consumed Calvin, and you can see it in the first ten pages of the Institutes, was a Christian doctrine of creation. What I mean by this is not creationism, although Calvin believed in a literal reading of Genesis, but a view of the glory of God found in the created order, and to the eyes of faith, gives profound witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ. “There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice,” and that therefore we are “not only to be spectators in this beautiful theatre but to enjoy the vast bounty and variety of good things which are displayed to us in it.”[3] Calvin approaches this amazing world, the “theatre of God’s glory,” with awe, amazement, or as he put it, “wonderment.” God rules over the creation as sovereign. Our lives are held in the sovereignty of God. Calvin is so overwhelmed by the beauty of creation, but also the beauty (yes, beauty) of God who has called, claimed, loved, and redeemed us in Jesus Christ, and so calls us to serve this God in the theatre of God’s glory, the world. Robinson, along with historians remind us that “Calvin was a product of Renaissance humanism, a student of Greek and Roman classics who reread Cicero [106 BC-43 BC] every year, a writer of exceptional grace and lucidity in both Latin and French, a man of prodigious learning, who did not dwell on damnation but rather exulted in a sovereign but not at all distant God, a God whose glory was manifest in the goodness of the world and the potential of humanity.”[4]

Calvin believed the entire creation is shouting out the glory of God, the love of God, the redemptive power of God’s concern for us, all the time. Some see it, others don’t. And the reason people can’t see it – naturally, unaided – is because of the power of sin. Because of sin we can’t see what’s clearly there in front of our eyes. Because of selfishness, our egocentricity, because of our brokenness, of our refusal to live into the vision God has for us in Christ, we turn our eyes and so we fall. We have to stop thinking of the Fall in Genesis as something that occurred once a long time ago. Every time we turn our face away from God, we fall. Every time we turn away, we fall – again and again and again. This is our condition. Calvin called it “total depravity” – this is not to say that there is no good in us, because there is; it is to say that there’s not an area of our lives that is so pure, so perfect, so good, so loving that we can freely choose the pure, the perfect, the good; there’s no place in our lives unaffected by the brokenness, the woundedness of the human condition. It’s total. It’s comprehensive. Sin is a problem – a huge problem – it constantly interferes with our ability to enjoy God – and we’re supposed to enjoy God. But we can’t will our way out of this predicament by being good.

Remember that “Little Engine That Could,” who made it to the top of the mountain through an effort of will? “I know I can. I know I can.” From a biblical perspective this is a deceptive strategy when it comes to God, or following Christ. Theologically speaking, we have to “Throw out the engine that could because you can’t.”[5] We can’t work our way toward God. We are flawed through and through, every one of us, if not all the time, then often. We are continually dependent upon on the graciousness of God to intervene, to do for us what we can never do for ourselves – and that is to freely choose God and love God completely with all our mind, soul, heart, and strength. Theologian, Paul Lehmann (1906-1994), once said that Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity was a “most hopeful of all doctrines.”[6] That might sound odd. Why hopeful? Because it acknowledges that the source of our salvation and the course of our eternal destiny is not contingent upon our ability to choose, to believe, or to be good, or perfect, or whatever.

Think about it. To believe that the source of my salvation is dependent upon something that I have do, some good work or collection of works I have to do to made God happy, dependent upon something I have earned, to prove myself worthy of God’s love and acceptance, that God’s acceptance of me is contingent upon my ability to completely believe and trust one hundred percent in God would the worst possible sentence inflicted upon me. That’s not good news, gospel. In fact, it would be the worse possible news. It would be hell. Because then I would be left in a state – knowing my own brokenness and my woundedness and the tragic flaws in my own life – I would never be able to live up to some idealized vision of what I think God wants from me. That would not be grace, but something else.

And grace is God’s eternal, free choice to say, Yes to me through Jesus Christ, and to say, Yes, to you through Jesus Christ. Because salvation is a gift that cannot be earned, because none of us are worthy, it has to be given – and it has been given, already through the grace of God revealed in life of Jesus Christ. God elects us, God chooses us, God makes the first move toward us. Calvin had such a high view of election – of predestination – not because he created the idea, but because it’s all over scripture. God elects Abraham and his children and calls them to be a blessing to the world. God chooses people to kings and priests and prophets. Jesus calls the disciples, they did not choose him first. Even Jesus Christ is the elect of God through whom God chooses to redeem the world. The idea of election emerges from Paul’s letter, especially this one to the Ephesians.

Through his experience of Jesus Christ, Paul came to understand – not in an intellectual way, but in an existential, heart-felt way – that he was acceptable in God’s sight, not through any works of the law or merits, but through the glorious grace revealed in Jesus Christ. These verses, 3- 14, make up one long sentence in Greek – it’s an effusive, dynamic, (over)flowing expression of affirmation that leads to a crescendo of confession. “Christ…is the mirror , in which it behooves us to contemplate our election; and here we may do it with safety.” (Institutes III.xxiv.5). Jesus Christ has set us free and this freedom is granted to those who are far off and those who are near. We are abundantly free – accepted completely in the eyes of God. For it is God’s plan, revealed in Jesus, to bring all people together into one people. God is working God’s purpose out through everyone and everything. Jesus takes up into the high places with him, with God, to find communion with God – Jesus takes us, escorts us into the presence of God – because we would never be able to get there on our own. Election is God’s plan to include us in the work of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Jesus himself said to his disciples, “You did not choose, but I chose you (John 15:16).” This comes as quite an ego-shock to us who like to think we’re in control, that it’s all about us, that we can choose what we believe and what don’t believe, that we’re responsible for our own salvation. The bad news to the ego is: No, you’re not. The good news to the depths of our soul is: No, you’re not. God is. God always makes the first move toward us. Even when we think we made the first move, it was God placing this yearning within us, illuminating the deepest desires of our hearts. In our faith and in our doubt, searching after God, God is drawing us into relationship with God.

The twentieth century Swiss theologian, Karl Barth, heir of Calvin, stressed, through a reading of Ephesians 1:3-4, that when God said Yes to Jesus in raising him from the grave, in saying Yes to Jesus “God has reached out to say yes to all human beings in Jesus Christ. This singular and potent, Yes, is the true biblical doctrine of election. It is not that God is bound to some and unbound to others. In the biblical doctrine of predestination, God is bound to each one of us by being bound to Jesus Christ in his life, death, and resurrection.”[7]

A word of caution, this doctrine of election is not meant to be a matter of speculative debate. Who is elect? Who isn’t? This is where the Calvinists who followed Calvin messed things up. They searched for proof of one’s election. Who is in? Who is out? That’s not for us to decide. Grace and with it election, for the two are related, “teaches that each of our lives is rooted in the gracious will and intentionality of God.” It’s meant to be a doctrine of encourage and hope.[8]

Why? Because God is working through us and is committed to us and will never leave us or abandon us. Why? Because God has work for you to do. Election is never a condition of privilege, but responsibility. Abraham and through him Israel were called, chosen, not because they were special, but because God had a job for them to do – to be a blessing to the world.

When we meditate and contemplate God’s grace, the reality of our election – that God has actually chosen us – we soon become discover that God has something in store for us to do, a new way to live and love, a new job to do, a new task, a project, a witness, a ministry – something.

This grace, this glorious grace is an extraordinary gift. To be chosen, to be elected, to be included in God’s redemptive plan and purpose is an amazing gift. But as Paul suggests in this text, we’re grafted, “adopted,” into God’s plan – because God has work for us to do. When we remember our election, we find ourselves empowered to serve, to live, to love in new ways – to enjoy God in new ways.

God might have elected us from the foundations of the world, but the working out of that salvation is not yet complete. We work out our salvation individually, but also in and through the community – it’s what the church is for. We might be elected, chosen by God in grace, but God isn’t finished with us yet, no matter what age we might be. The poet Maya Angelou expresses her amazement at people who boast that they are saved, who think that their growth in grace stops with their profession of faith, or who are confident in their status as Christians. “You are a Christian?” she asks of them, of us. And she adds, “Already?”[9]

The Christian life for Paul, for Calvin, for us as a people reformed and always being reformed, is living into the people we are by God’s glorious grace through Jesus Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever in the depths of our hearts. We are called to live into our election. Thanks be to God.

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[1] Peter Steinfels, The New York Times, July 4, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/us/04beliefs.html.

[2] John Calvin, cited in a lecture by Serene Jones, “Calvin, Creation, and the Holy Spirit.” Calvin Jubilee, Montreat, NC, 9^th July 2009.

[3] From Calvin’s Commentary on Psalm 104:331, quoted by William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 135.

[4] Steinfels.

[5] Cynthia L. Rigby in her lecture, “Calvin and the Wondrous Glory of God.” Calvin Jubilee, Montreat, NC, 8 July 2009. I’m am indebted to Cindy’s lecture for providing a larger theological context in which to frame the doctrine of election.

[6] Cited by Rigby.

[7] William Stacy Johnson, John Calvin: Reformer for the 21^st Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 48.

[8] Johnson, 42.

[9] Cited in Johnson, 45.

This Lively Experiment

2 Corinthians 12: 1-10

14^th Sunday in Ordinary Time/ 5^th July2009

“If I must boast,” wrote Paul, “I will boast of the things that show my weakness (2 Cor. 11:30).” We don’t hear talk like this everyday. It’s Paul’s response to those in the Corinthian church who accused him of having a big head, who were questioning some of his claims and thereby questioning his authority over them. He doesn’t respond with a litany substantiating his claims, his authority, his experience. Instead, still being faithful to his conscience he offers a counter-intuitive argument. If he is going to be charged with having a boastful spirit, then let the judge declare him guilty; guilty, boasting not of his strengths, but of his weaknesses.

That’s not the kind of argument we’re used to hearing. It’s counter-intuitive, not what we expect, irrational, even counter-cultural: boasting of weakness instead of strength. Boasting of strength – we know what that means, we can imagine that quite easily, we know what bombastic displays of strength and power look like, feel like, we’ve seen people celebrate it, worship it, glory in it, remind others of it; heck, we’ve done it ourselves.

But boasting in weakness? Now “that’s a horse of a different color.” Where are bombastic displays celebrating weakness, glorifying, worshipping weakness? Where are we freely exposing our weaknesses, being grateful for them?

Yet, this is precisely the way Paul responds to his accusers. He doesn’t want to puff himself up; he’s willing to be the fool. He’s not willing to boast in the strength of his claims, but say he’s weak. He was given a thorn in the flesh precisely to keep him from being too elated. We’re not sure what it was, it could have been suffering from an eye condition. Three times he asked the Lord to remove the thorn. Each time he heard back, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”

There it is again – this counter-intuitive, even irrational response to the way we’ve come to expect the world to work. God’s grace is sufficient – which means in everything else we can be insufficient and be okay. Power is made perfect in weakness – which means that God’s display of power is known most profoundly not in times or expressions of brute force and strength but precisely in those moments when we acknowledge our weakness, our frailty, our fragility. Paul takes this approach, not because strength is inherently bad (because it’s not), but because when we think our strength and individual resources are sufficient, then there’s no perceived need for God’s grace. If we rely upon our strength, we effectively move God out of the picture. When we are counting on our own resources and wisdom, then we push God to the side. Why does Paul boast in his weakness? “So that the power of Christ [that is, not his power] may dwell in me.”

There it is again, this counter-intuitive move, this irrational, paradoxical, counter-cultural maneuver: we are strongest – with the power of Christ at work within us – when we are at our weakest. When we are weak and acknowledge we are weak, fragile, frail, insufficient then we can be open to the sufficiency of God’s grace; when we confess our need, our lack, then we can be open to what God will provide, what God will give.

Paul can even make this profound claim, “I am content with weaknesses, insult, hardships, persecutions, and calamities,” and he experienced them all. Why? Not to be a martyr, but for the sake of Christ. Because “whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” Paul’s confession here reflects the insights of an extremely mature person of faith. You don’t come to this kind of wisdom easily and it’s not found in books. Lincoln’s (1812-1865) words on the bulletin cover reflect such a spirit.[1] You can’t teach this to someone else, you can’t learn it in church school or discover it from listening to a sermon. It’s the kind of personal knowledge one comes to know through experience – through suffering, pain, hardship – his experience of what it’s like to know the power of Christ in one’s life.

Needless to say, this understanding of weakness and strength has never been well-received by Christians or the church, particularly when the church got itself mixed up with political, economic, and cultural power. Sadly, the church likes power through strength. The church wants to have influence, authority, we want to be liked, and in our long history we had plenty of low moments when the church sold its soul for the sake of being “popular,” displaying its power through a monarch or army. Think of the church’s welcome embrace when Emperor Constantine (c.272-337) made Christianity the religion of the empire in 312 A.D., or when the Pope had his own army and led them into battle (why did the Pope need an army?); or during the Protestant Reformation when the reformers sought the protection of the monarchs in their cause, or the French Wars of Religion (1562-1598) and the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) between Protestants and Catholics; or when Protestants tried to set up theocracies (like the Puritans settlement in Massachusetts). All kind of abuses took place.

Yet, it’s a weakness exuding strength that remains at the heart of the Christian confession. There’s no way around this. It’s a weakness we don’t eagerly embrace, because we would rather replace weakness with strength, hide weakness behind a persona or mask of strength. Never let anyone see you weak. Always be strong. But that’s not the Christian way; despising weakness can actually be an anti-Christian, the way of anti-Christ.

In 1888, the philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote a scathing polemic against Christianity, entitled The Anti-Christ. It was a summary of everything he earlier wrote regarding Christianity, this son of a Lutheran pastor. Nietzsche saw the 19^th century expression of Christianity as the source for all that was wrong in the world. He asked, “What is good? -- All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? -- All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases…Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency, … The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philosophy….What is more harmful than any vice? Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak – Christianity.”[2] This from a man who saw actively caring for the weak in our society as a weakness that had to be overcome, the weak removed from society. Is it any wonder that Nietzsche was suspicious of democracies? And why so much of his philosophy was adopted by the National Socialist movement in Hitler’s Germany.

I share this to form a sharp contrast with the vision our founders aspired to realize for this nation, this “lively experiment” in democracy that we celebrate this weekend. This experiment has to do with freedom, of course, and the degree to which a government will allow its people freedom to form its Constitution, elect its leaders, acknowledge inalienable rights, equal rights for the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, those with influence and authority and those without, provide freedom of the individual to pursue happiness as one so chooses happiness, providing it does not incur harm on others, freedom to believe or not.

“Lively experiment” was the way King Charles II (1630-1685) described his charter to the Rhode Island colony in 1663. Is it possible for people to live with free expression and religious freedom? Since then, these two items have been inseparable. There was no freedom of religion and therefore no freedom of expression anywhere in the colonies (or the Christian world, for that matter) at this time. Rhode Island is the first place in history where no established faith and full freedom to practice any faith or no faith at all was put into practice. The Maryland colony (Terra Maria, as it was known) was charted with religious toleration for Catholics and Protestants in 1632. The 1649 religious toleration act was limited to Trinitarian Christians in Maryland, but did not grant the freedom not to believe. In 1650, Reformed Christians outlawed Catholicism and Anglicanism in Maryland.

Roger Williams (1603-1683) considered the Massachusetts Bay colony “corrupt” because it mixed church and state. Williams demanded a “wall of separation” between the state and the church in order to guard the “garden of the church” from the “wilderness of the world.” During his trial Williams ensured his condemnation by affirming religious freedom, what Williams called “soul liberty,” for every person. He wanted Rhode Island to be “a haven for the cause of conscience.”[3]

While we join Americans across this nation celebrating our liberties and freedoms, as Christians we also need to celebrate and give thanks to God, not because the founders were Christian, many were, but not all and some were even antagonistic to orthodox Christianity, like Jefferson (1743-1826), but thankful for religious freedom, because religious freedom – separation of church and state – is intricately connected to the larger concept of political freedom that we celebrate this weekend. Religious liberty led the way to liberty for all. How we make space for those who believe or don’t believe informs the way we make space for our fellow citizens in this republic. However, this is always a precious, fragile undertaking.

Even after signing the Declaration of Independence and well beyond the formation of the Constitution, the question of religious freedom was still in question. Religious freedom wasn’t granted here because it was a noble, radical, progressive idea (which it was and is), but because no religious group was strong enough to establish and enforce religion in America. The Anglicans were the majority in Virginia (and just barely tolerated Presbyterians), the Presbyterians were in New Jersey, and the Puritans held sway in New England. Because religious traditions were equally weak they made space for each other. The only way to ensure religious freedom for all the groups in America (and there were many) was to guarantee it for all the other groups.[4] Later, Thomas Jefferson in his famous Letter to the Virginia Baptists in 1808, wrote, “We have solved by fair experiment the great and interesting question whether freedom of religion is compatible with order in government and obedience to laws.” Jefferson wanted a wall to protect the state from the church; Williams wanted a wall to protect the church from the state.

But have we really “solved” it? This “lively experiment”—this uniquely American experiment – cannot be taken for granted. The Constitution might guarantee religious freedom, but there are always forces at work who want to take it away, to chip away at it. It’s really very fragile, very weak. The experiment continues. The revolutionary spirit in Iran these past weeks against the theocratic regime should warn us of that dangerous cocktail when religion and authoritarian power mix. There is no place for the religious minority in Iran, there are no rights guaranteed to them, they are vulnerable, weak indeed. We need to be wary of those who claim the strength and authority to assert one religious view in American society at the expense of the weak. We need to be wary of those who try to assert a theocracy and those on the left who try to take away religious rights. A government of the people cannot make the minority suffer at the hands of the majority.

Now, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all of this. I’ve veered far from the scriptural text– and I’m not exactly sure how to get back there! There’s not a direct correlation between what Paul is talking about and what I’m trying to say. John Witherspoon (1723-1794), the Presbyterian minister-signer of the Declaration said, “Never rise to speak till you have something to say; and when you have said it, cease.” So, I will say this, and then cease.

The Christian way that values weakness, allows us to be weak, and thereby calls us to protect the weak because of what God might be saying and doing through the weak, eventually leads to the democratic idea. And this idea, this experiment is, itself, fragile – and needs to be preserved.

This lively, this American experiment elevates “individual conscience” – which is what Paul was staking his claim on, speaking with conviction about his experience and being faithful to his conscience. The individual whenever compared with the power and influence of the collective, or “the crowd,” as Kierkegaard (1813-1855) warned, or “the herd,” as Nietzsche termed it, is extraordinarily weak indeed. That’s why we need to preserve the rights of the individual. In celebrating the liberty of the individual conscience (which is a Reformed idea that goes back to Calvin’s Geneva, which was not a theocracy but a city for religious refugees from across Europe persecuted for their belief), we find a government that celebrates and, at its best, “protects the autonomy and liberty of the individual. Here the state limits itself. Here the state protects the rights of the minority from the convictions of the majority, even though the majority doesn’t like it.”[5]

John Buchanan, former moderator of the General Assembly, one of the great preachers and leaders of our denomination makes this point, “At our best we have understood that individual rights are at the heart of this experiment and that individuals are protected, nurtured, cared for, that because God is sovereign and all people are children of God, there are no unimportant people, no throw away people.”

Every generation has to work hard to ensure the rights and freedom of all people within American society. We are truly “strong,” in a biblical sense of the term, when the weak are cared for, respected, when the minority is given a voice. This is, perhaps, America’s greatest strength and the greatest gift, among many, we have to give to the world. Maybe – just maybe – Paul had something to do with all of this and maybe even Calvin.

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[1] “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for the day.”

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, R. J. Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1944), 114-115.

[3] See Barbara Vowell’s editorial, “A Plantation to be Proud Of,” which appeared in Sunday’s New York Times, July 5, 2009, referring to many of the same quotes and themes highlighted in the sermon: www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/opinion/05vowell.html?scp=2&sq=rhode%20island&st=cse

[4] See Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963, 16ff.

[5] John Buchanan, “Knowing Whom to Obey,” Sermon preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, IL, July 2, 2000.

Image: Only surviving fragment of Thomas Jefferson’s early composition draft of the Declaration of Independence, from June 1776.